Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/673

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Anselm's journey are the negotiations which went on during this time between William, Urban, and Anselm. The Red King's day of grace was now over. The last touch of feeling recorded of him is when he bowed his head to receive Anselm's blessing. Henceforth he stands out, in a more marked way than ever, in the character which distinguishes him from other kings and from other men. We have had evil kings before and after him; but we have had none other who openly chose evil to be his good, none other who declared himself in plain words to be the personal enemy of the Almighty. Yet, as we have already noticed, the bolts of the Church never lighted on the head of this worst of royal sinners. We have just seen how once at least he was spared by the merciful intercession of his own victim. We are tempted to stop and think how a formal excommunication would have worked on such an one as William Rufus had now become. We must remember that the weight of papal excommunications of princes had not yet been lowered, as it came to be lowered afterwards, either by their frequency or by their manifest injustice. The cases which were then fresh in men's minds were all striking and weighty. The excommunication of the Emperor was, from the papal point of view, a natural stage of the great struggle which was still raging. Philip of France had been excommunicated for a moral offence which seemed the darker because it involved the mockery of an ecclesiastical sacrament. And no man could wonder or blame when, in the days of Hildebrand, Boleslaus of Poland was put out of the communion of the faithful for slaying with his own hands before the altar the bishop who had rebuked him for his sins. The case most akin to the wanton excommunications of later times had been when Alexander the